UK Floods

When the storms first hit southern Malawi in January, Edina Anyezi, a 44-year-old mother and well-respected Senior Chief Kawinga of Mwanyali Village, rushed home to rescue her family's few belongings from the rising floodwaters.

It's time to stop idly watching the decimation of our communities, and instead look to implement a multi-billion pound, long term water management infrastructure plan that will safeguard these wet little isles for decades to come.

Of course, there is no military solution to climate change. You can't resolve it with bombs and bullets. You can only solve it by ending our usage of fossil fuels, and protecting the public from the climate change impacts already in the pipeline. That is a rather different security challenge to the one usually faced by the military. But it also makes fossil fuels and the firms lobbying for them Public Enemy Number One.

Bárðarbunga is a big volcano by Iceland standards and its starting to wake up! Where is it? Will it erupt and shut down Europe's airspace? What about the ice flood risks? The news has been rolling out different scenarios.

Here in the UK we do like to moan about the weather. We especially like to moan if it exposes flaws in preparing for said weather, such as a dusting of snow crippling London's transport networks, or inadequate clean-up operations afterwards, as experienced in last winter's near-biblical floods.

Britain's warm, wet winter brought floods and misery to many living across southern England, with large parts of Somerset lying underwater for months. When in January rainfall was double the expected average over wide areas, many people made cautious links between such extreme weather and global climate change.

rotecting the Thames Valley from flooding is in the local, regional and national interest. I'm optimistic this can be achieved. The prime minister has shown his support for investing in flood defences and the government's fully behind accelerating this scheme. We just need to crack on...

It's clear to me, and no doubt the thousands of people whose lives have been destroyed by the winter floods that it's not just nature that is to blame for the now annual flood destruction, farmers and Government must also share in the responsibility. After all, we had been warned. And repeatedly.

Back in the UK one could blame the farmers but the real culprit is our government and their ideology of scrapping environmental regulations in the absurd belief that a free market will hold back the waters. Whether through corruption, ideological dogma or an obsession with self-serving headlines rather than finding lasting solutions, both governments fail their people.

In the aftermath of the floods and the debate about what needs to be done to prevent similar events in future, there has been a focus on the role of farming. A lot of this has been about land use, and how water can be slowed down with trees, better soil management and wetlands...

Follow our top ten tips to recover your garden after flooding if you're in this situation and we hope we can help you restore your garden to its former glory over time. Weird and wonderful things can happen to your landscape after a flood.

Companies know whom they insure and what the likely risks are. If we can predict flooding sufficiently far in advance, isn't there an opportunity for private insurers to apply the old adage that prevention is better than cure?

There has been an exceptionally high number of storms in the UK since the start of December. With more rainfall on the way this is already the wettest winter ever recorded, and in line with what is expected to become more common with climate change...

The overarching theme of this blog is to show that better use of the skills and creativity of the UK advertising and communications sector would benefit society as a whole as well as business... But even I admit that, with all the creativity in the world, none of us could stop the floods which have dominated our media landscape.

Type the phrase "good in a crisis" into Google and you get 1.8 million hits. Search for "good at preventing crises" and you get just sixteen. It's a sad fact that - whether as individuals or as nations - we spend infinitely more time, energy and money dealing with problems than we do preventing them.